Stigma: Life as a Series of Job Interviews

When you apply for a job, while you are checking out whether the position is right for you, you want to make the hiring manager think that you are right for the job. I don’t mean lying about your skills, although that may come into play; I mean hiding your disqualifying traits. These are called stigmas—anything about you or your history which, if known, would disqualify you from the role you are attempting to pull off. (The most insidious, most pervasive stigmas are those that disqualify us in the eyes of others from playing the role of human being.)

Some stigmas are disqualifying because others know you have them, some because you didn’t hide them. If you plagiarized part of your master’s thesis, letting that be known would disqualify you from many professional roles, but the hidden fact that you did so does not harm your performance. If you don’t work all day but take periodic excursions into web-surfing and daydreaming, the fact of that is not disqualifying, and if it were discovered by accident, it would do no harm, but telling people you work that way would make them wonder why you don’t know you are supposed to hide it.

This last category includes most mental illnesses and psychological problems: Many people have them, but if you mention your depression or anxiety in a job application, interviewers are likely to wonder how much trouble you are going to be, or whether you are likely to insist that no one ask you to get more done.

When you go to a restaurant, you are applying for the “job” of diner and the waitress is applying for the job of server. Both sides conduct a quick screen of “credentials.” If you look like it’s been weeks since your last bath, there is likely to be some hesitance about giving you a table and a meal. If the waitress looks similarly, there may be hesitance about consuming food she has touched.

Appearing to be unwashed would not disqualify a person, however, from occupying many other roles, such as a miner at the end of the shift. I imagine that walking into certain bars during happy hour in coal country could be a dicey proposition if you are dressed for dinner at an upscale restaurant. The “job” of happy-hour coal miner would not be offered.

A guy in Santa Monica asked me on the street if I could change a $20 (before parking meters took credit cards), and I just gave him the six quarters I happened to have. His embarrassed manner, costuming, and situation all communicated that he was well-suited for the role of stuck motorist and poorly suited for the role of scam artist or street beggar, so he got the job of stuck motorist, a position whose occupant I was happy to help out.

Because we have grown to be so self-conscious about judging people, we often ignore red flags when dating (interviewing people for the job of boyfriend or girlfriend). Also, it’s hard to be perceptive while yearning—when your heart’s on fire, the songwriter said, smoke gets in your eyes. If a student wants to be accepted by me for the role of student, they have to be, above all, curious and playful. I often fail in my application for the role of teacher; the feedback I get is that I talk too loud, speak too frankly, and show impatience with the incurious and unplayful.

In the same way that things that would operate as stigmas during the interview (“I hate grading papers”) often don’t operate as stigmas once you have the job, my wife and I accept and even cherish each other’s bad habits that we knew not to display at the outset. Students tolerate and appreciate my frivolity once we get to know each other, just as I come to tolerate and appreciate their insecurities and complexes and, especially, individualism.

Although I am making a case for the benefits of stigma (which are signs that a person is not suitable for a specific role), I also agree that stigma can become problematic. We have a tendency to assume that if an identity element stigmatizes a person with respect to one role, it does so with respect to other roles as well.

Depression Essential Reads

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The analogy to a series of job interviews can help people manage an unfortunate aspect of the generally valuable functions of stigmas. I already mentioned the problem of assuming that a stigma generalizes to more roles than it does, which is particularly relevant to psychological and medical stigmas. Certain conditions disqualify us from playing certain roles—the blind Uber driver, the depressed air traffic controller, the emotionally fragile therapist. But that doesn’t mean they disqualify the person from every role.

The Americans with Disabilities Act addresses this problem in actual hiring, and its insights are applicable in the daily series of job interviews as well. The key is whether “reasonable accommodations” can be made, in actual jobs for the disability and in virtual jobs or social roles for the psychological or medical condition.

Similarly, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, along with subsequent legislation, makes it illegal in actual job interviews to discriminate against an individual on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age over 40, and national origin. Whenever we find ourselves disqualifying someone from a social role because of one of these identity elements, we ought to correct ourselves, look beyond the label, and determine whether they are qualified or not to play the role. This applies whether the role in question is receptionist, daughter-in-law, professor teaching multiculturalism, or auto mechanic.

Many discriminatory stigmas are upheld on the basis of prevalence: most white men are homophobic, goes the claim, so there’s nothing wrong with assuming that this white man is homophobic. That’s illegal in actual hiring and unprincipled in casting social roles.